Product Description

A brilliant virtuoso of violence, Richard Marcinko rose through Navy ranks to create and command one of this country's most elite and classified counterterrorist units, SEAL TEAM SIX. Now this thirty-year veteran recounts the secret missions and Special Warfare madness of his worldwide military career -- and the riveting truth about the top-secret Navy SEALs.

Marcinko was almost inhumanly tough, and proved it on hair-raising missions across Vietnam and a war-torn world: blowing up supply junks, charging through minefields, jumping at 19,000 feet with a chute that wouldn't open, fighting hand-to-hand in a hellhole jungle. For the Pentagon, he organized the Navy's first counterterrorist unit: the legendary SEAL TEAM SIX, which went on classified missions from Central America to the Middle East, the North Sea, Africa and beyond.

Then Marcinko was tapped to create Red Cell, a dirty-dozen team of the military's most accomplished and decorated counterterrorists. Their unbelievable job was to test the defenses of the Navy's most secure facilities and installations. The result was predictable: all hell broke loose.

Here is the hero who saw beyond the blood to ultimate justice -- and the decorated warrior who became such a maverick that the Navy brass wanted his head on a pole, and for a time, got it. Richard Marcinko -- ROGUE WARRIOR.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7151 in Books
• Published on: 1993-03-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 416 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780671795931
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
One of the most controversial veterans of the U.S. Navy's amphibious commando unit, whose troops are known as SEALs, Marcinko describes his combat adventures in Southeast Asia and his counterterrorist activities. A 10-week PW bestseller in cloth. Photos.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
An autobiography of a career naval officer who dropped out of high school, enlisted in the U.S. Navy, and spent his ca reer struggling to win acceptance for special warfare SEAL (sea-air-land) units within the Navy establishment from the late 1950s to the present. Marcinko provides detailed descriptions of the early transformation of underwater demolition teams (UDT) into SEAL units. With interesting vignettes about training and actual missions during the Vietnam War, he gives a close-up view of this specialized and little-known brand of warfare. Marcinko's participation in the Iran hostage rescue attempt in 1980 and the U.S. invasion of Grenada in 1983 provide a perspective vastly different from the accepted versions of these events. However, the overuse of salty language throughout the book that lends new meaning to the phrase "curse like a sailor" and Marcinko's polemical accounts of his struggles to win acceptance for specialized warfare within the Navy are unfortunate. Not a necessary purchase. Military Book Club main selection.
- Harold N. Boyer, Marple P.L., Broomall, Pa.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
The stormy career of a top Navy SEAL hotspur. Commander Marcinko, USN Ret., recently served time at Petersburg Federal Prison for conspiracy to defraud the Navy by overcharging for specialized equipment--the result, he says, of telling off too many admirals. It seems that his ornery and joyous aggression, nurtured by a Czech grandfather in a flinty Pennsylvania mining town, has brought him to grief in peace and to brilliance in war. Serving his first tour in Vietnam in 1966 as an enlisted SEAL expert in underwater demolition, Marcinko returned for a second tour as an officer leading a commando squad he had trained. Here, his accounts of riverine warfare--creeping underwater to Vietcong boats and slipping over their gunwales; raiding VC island strongholds in the South China Sea; steaming up to the Cambodian border to tempt the VC across and being overrun- -are galvanic, detailed, and told with a true craftsman's love. What did he think of the Vietcong? ``The bastards--they were good.'' His battle philosophy? ``...kill my enemy before he has a chance to kill me....Never did I give Charlie an even break.'' After the aborted desert rescue of US hostages in the Tehran embassy, Marcinko was ordered to create SEAL Team Six--a counterterrorist unit with worldwide maritime responsibilities. In 1983, the unit was deployed to Beirut to test the security of the US embassy there. Easily evading the embassy security detail, sleeping Lebanese guards, and the Marines, the SEALs planted enough fake bombs to level the building. When Marcinko spoke to ``a senior American official'' about the problem, the SEAL's blunt security advice was rejected, particularly in respect to car-bomb attacks. Ninety days later, 63 people in the embassy compound were killed by a suicide bomber driving a TNT-filled truck. Profane and asking no quarter: the real nitty-gritty, bloody and authentic. (Eight-page photo insert--not seen.) -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

WOW!
For sheer adventure and excitement, this is hard to beat. The autobographical account of one of the original creators of the deadly Seal Team covert operations squads. Richard was a former frogman and UDT member. He was also a wild, drinking, swearing, fighting guy whose outrageous courage and antics led him from a man with little education, to a top official in the US Navy Seals. On the way he broke the rules, rankled officers, and pushed for the best treatment and gear he could get for his men. By neccesity these man lived hard and fought hard.

In the end of his career he claims the navy went after him on a personal agenda to drive him out on drummed up criminal charges, jealous officers and so forth. It may be true, and it may also be that the exact skills and tempermant that made him so effective against the enemy were a detriment when dealing with the whitewashed pencil pushers at the pentagon. It is tough tobe a stone cold killer in peacetime and just turn that aggression on and off.

To hear another persons opinion on what happened to Marcinko, read "Brave Men Dark Waters" also sold at Amazon.com. It's author, Orr Kelly, was in the Seals with Marcinko and as part of his own book tells the story of Marcinko as an out of control egotist, a real rogue warrior. Read these and other books, and you be the judge. Regardless, i could not put this book from Marcinko down, very exciting.

Unbelievable, but true Autobiography
I have actually read all of Capt. Marcinko's books to date; however, this book is the best by far because its his true-life adventures in the World Of SPEC War. Growing up not too far from where Capt. Marcinko was born, I became fascinated with his story. To read of his adventures and his antics and to see what was done to him in return is unbelievable. What makes it scary is that it is true. I'm not going to go into the scemantics of the writing style or break down the entire book for you, but what I am going to do is tell you the truth... Yes, this book may be hard for some of you to read. Yes, he may be an egocentric adrenaline junky, but first and foremost, he is a soldier, who has served his country and fought for the freedom we all take for granted. In the times in which we live, we need a true hero like Dick Marcinko to make us proud to be Americans, because we have so few hero's to look up to now. If you don't like his abrasive philosophising and his "take the world by the balls" attitude then all I have to say is "Doom on You". Dick Macinko is a true hero and a present day warrior and its men like him who have served our country in times of need, and who have fought and given up their lives for our country, that makes me proud to be an American.

Blunt talk from a guy who was SOF before it was hip
I read this book not long after Marckinko's interview with 60 Minutes. At the time, I was very impressed with Marcinko's testosterone filled prose. However, as time went by I began to see Marcinko more as sort of a loud mouth alcoholic than as a guy to be taken seriously. Marcinko definitely went "rogue" after his SEAL Team Six command was up and he created Red cell.

Personally, I believe Marcinko would have gone much further in the Navy chain of command had he stopped drinking. Had the guy had the sense to cut the boozing out, he probably would have made Admiral. I seriously doubt he would have ended up in prison had he cut out the booze. Its obvious the guy lives for booze and is a hardcore alcoholic. Because of his boozing, I dont see Marcinko as someone to look up to, like say I would look up to Colonel Charlie Beckwith or Dick Meadows.

As for the book itself, its basically a more flamboyant, testosterone filled version of Charlie Beckwith's "Delta Force." Marckinko describes basically the same exact problems in establishing SEAL Team Six that Beckwith encountered in establishing Delta Force. Principle among these problems were intense disagreements over the SEAL Team Six chain of command. Marcinko describes how he was oftentimes more at war with the conventional Navy bureaucracy and the established SEAL community of the early eighties era than with international terrorists.

Marckinko describes how conventional SEAL officers of the early eighties era fought vigorously to keep SEAL Team Six in the east coast SEAL chain of command. Basically keeping it regular Navy and having total Navy control. Whereas Marcinko wanted Team Six in the brand new, "high speed" JSOC chain of command that Delta Force was part of. Marcinko wanted Team Six as part of the JSOC, whereas the east coast SEAL Headquarters and conventional Navy resisted this severely. It was only thru repeated bypassing of the normal chain of command that Marcinko got his way. And he obviously made a ton of enemies within the regular Navy and even the conventional SEAL community doing this.

Marcinko was an independent officer who did his own thing, rather than bowing down to the conventional Navy and the conventional SEAL officers of the late seventies and early eighties. Again, many of his problems are exactly what Charlie Beckwith describes in his own book "Delta Force," written in the early eighties.

In addition, some of the things Marcinko mentions in his book are pure bull. Such as his claim that his men had to be able to bench press 500 lbs to climb special ladders to clandestinely board ships underway. Being able to bench press 500 lbs has little to nothing to do with being able to climb ladders or ropes. In fact, the muscle groups used in these activities are totally different. Again, much of this book is testosterone filled bull, from someone who is obviously a megalomaniac.

Despite this, its still a good read and Id recommend it to anyone interested in SEALs or SOF. One thing I admired about Marcinko was his total lack of respect for bureaucracy and conventional thinking.

Its my personal opinion that had he stopped drinking in the late seventies or early eighties, Marcinko probably would have made Admiral and might have ended up commanding the SEAL community when USSOCOM was formed. Or he might have been able to have become the second or third in command officer at JSOC. Instead, he ended up going to federal prison.

After reading this book and Marcinko's other books the basic message Ive gotten is threefold and simple. First, you cant have a real SOF unit without a clean, direct, bureaucracy free SAS type chain of command. Secondly, in the real world the SEALs take a backseat to Delta. And thirdly, booze destroys good men.